Odd
by cherry-sodas
Summary: "You're real strange," Dallas Winston tells Lucy Bennet for more than thirty years. "You know that?" [AU. Embedded into the 'Arrogance and Aggression' universe.]
1. Chapter 1

**So, this story, which takes place in the 'Arrogance and Aggression' universe, is the diatribe to end all diatribes. It was going to be a super-long one shot, but I decided I'm not evil enough to do that. Since Lucy Bennet and Dallas Winston are the main ship in that universe, **_**of course **_**their fairytale-inspired piece is going to be the longest. Strap in. At least they're clever and entertaining together.**

**One thing is retconned from the original 'Arrogance and Aggression.' In that story, I imply (read: state) that Lucy and Dally don't have very much interaction until 1965. That was back when I didn't think there would be more than just that one story. So, uh, consider it the fault of the unreliable third-person narrator (AKA me).**

* * *

Lucy Bennet felt odd in the fall of 1962, when she and her family moved from Detroit to Tulsa.

She had always been without a nation. She'd been born in New Haven, Connecticut when her father was finishing his dissertation, though she remembered nothing of Yale. The family lived for a few years in a suburb of Chicago, and the only thing she could remember about that her mother's fear of ever letting her out of the apartment. Needless to say, she didn't make a lot of friends in Chicago. When Lucy was ten, they moved to a tiny town in Northwest Ohio, where Lucy learned that she was the only girl within probably a seventy-five-mile radius who thought that girls deserved to be treated as well as boys. It was there she'd gotten into her first and last fist fights – separate occasions, though later on in life, she'd be more inclined to repeat the story of the latter. They told her that the kids would be nicer in that small town in Ohio. They lied. It was there that Lucy Bennet learned how to cold … distant … angry. If she'd been odd before then, she was odder after.

Detroit wasn't home, and she only lived there for a year while her father served as an adjunct professor in the English department of their only urban university. But it was the place where Lucy felt the _least _odd. It was the place that, years later, she'd be inclined to call her home because it was the first place where she felt she could have stayed and been something resembling happy. People there loved music and books like she did. People there were tough and didn't accept bullshit answers. No one in Detroit expected Lucy Bennet to choose between being smart and being tough. They needed her to be both. They _liked _that she was both. So, naturally, in August 1962, her parents packed up their Detroit apartment and moved to _Tulsa, Oklahoma_ for their first everything – Jack Bennet's first tenure-track job, the family's first house, and Lucy's first venture into friendship.

She met Sadie Curtis, who was a grade below her in school but had been double promoted to ninth-grade English, on her first day of school, not knowing that the first girl who seemed to want to be her friend came with a whole set of other friends. It was like buying that Barbie doll and getting a Ken doll, too, only nobody in Sadie's gang was anything like Ken or Barbie. They also weren't anything like her. Sadie's friend Jane Randle was a kleptomaniac who read celebrity magazines like they were the Gospels. Sadie's twin brother, Sodapop, looked like one of the guys in the celebrity magazines, and about a week into knowing them, Jane was horrified and impressed by Soda's getting into a brawl with a guy who spoke ill of her. Jane hadn't been very complicated then. Worst of all, they had this friend (though calling him a friend seemed rather like a fabrication) called Dallas Winston, who lied, cheated, and stole whatever crossed his path. In the very second that he met Lucy, he took it upon himself to ask her if she was easy. She'd never heard a boy talk to a girl that way in real life, and she never expected that it would happen to her. From that first day of school and on, Lucy resolved to hate Dallas Winston for as long as she should live, both in Tulsa and in the world. It would have been much easier to hate him, of course, had he ever left her alone.

Since she only got to walk the halls with Sadie after the last bell rang, Lucy spent most of her days alone. One afternoon in the middle of November, she was eating her lunch under a tree in the school's backyard, alone. It was then that she heard two girls (Sadie, Jane, and the younger girls from the neighborhood would have called them _Socs_, a word Lucy didn't hear a lot in the places where she grew up, where no one could afford to be one.) talking about some annoying girl from their French class. Strangely, it took her a few seconds to realize that they were talking about her.

"I don't understand why she's gotta use that accent of hers _every time she raises her hand_," the first girl said. "Is it just to make everybody else feel crummy about _their _accents? Does she really think she needs to show off like that?"

"Maybe," the other girl said. "I was listening to her talk to the teacher before class the other day, and she said that last year, she read _Les Misérables _in less than two months."

When Lucy heard the other girl say _Les Misérables _(and perfectly butcher the correct pronunciation), she flinched and finally understood that she was their target. Her heart sank. Even though she presented herself as the kind of girl who welcomed it when other people spoke ill of her so that she could show off her toughness, her first reactions were always surprise and sadness. Why did people find it so easy to make fun of her? Why wasn't she better at putting up a front? Every time she thought she was getting tougher, she could still feel a little bit of that pain – the pain that came from being odd – jab at her when she hadn't invited it.

"Have you ever _seen _how many _pages _are in that book?" the first girl asked. "There are over a thousand. I guess that means nobody's ever wanted to kiss her. It's probably why she shows off that accent. She doesn't have much else to show off."

After hearing that, Lucy glanced down at her chest, which had matured far more quickly than her mind, and frowned. She had plenty to show off if she wanted to, which she didn't.

"But I heard from somebody that she's shown off plenty to Dallas Winston," the second girl giggled. "And I don't think it was just a French accent."

Now, both girls were giggling, presumably out of nervousness and jealousy put together.

Lucy felt her palms turn into fists. Excellent. Thanks to that pig Dallas Winston, it didn't matter whether she wanted to be that kind of girl. Everybody already believed she was. She stood up from her place under the tree, scaring the living hell out of the Soc girls once they saw she'd been listening to their gossip, and she made her way to the bleachers.

If she'd been a little more logical and a lot less hotheaded, she wouldn't have gone after Dallas Winston. She would have been smart enough to know that he was reckless, lacked any sort of discernment, and while he hated everyone in the world, there was no one he hated more than a challenger. But Lucy didn't think that way. She thought like Dallas Winston, and that was why she didn't think twice about going to confront the bastard.

She climbed up the bleachers where he sat with his friends (who were more like Sadie and Soda's friends, since they were decent people who knew how to show loyalty to others) Two-Bit Mathews and Steve Randle and stood right in front of Dally, blocking the sunlight that had been hitting him before. She cleared her throat loudly and folded her arms across her chest. When Dally saw her standing there, he couldn't help but almost smile. Not only was Lucy Bennet right in front of him, presumably for the taking, but also, she looked real cute. She thought it was her way of scolding him. That wasn't even close.

"This must be my lucky day," Dally said. "And that's sayin' a lot, considerin' I don't think I've ever had a lucky day. Hey, 'm I dead?"

"If you're dead, I get your blade," Steve said.

"If you're dead, I get to date your sister," Two-Bit said at the same time.

Dally rolled his eyes and ignored the two clowns sitting on either side of him. He leaned forward and stared directly into Lucy Bennet's eyes. If he'd been a different kind of guy, he probably would have been impressed by how beautiful and blue they were – how they were hot with anger, and that was what made them beautiful. But he wasn't that guy. He was the guy who started rumors about her just because he wanted to.

"Can I ask you something?"

"I'm listenin'," Dally said.

"Where do you get off?"

"Well, I don't know, sweetheart. You point anywhere, and I'll show ya."

Lucy turned an embarrassing shade of scarlet. She should have seen it coming. No, he'd be able to manipulate that the way he wanted to hear it, too. For a moment, she wondered if it was bizarre to edit even her thoughts to save them from Dallas Winston, but then she remembered that he seemed to be able to hear her thoughts. She could tell by his thousand-yard smirk and stare.

"There are Socs girls over there who think I've flashed you," Lucy said. "I want to know why."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, it's not true, so …"

"No, I don't believe it. When I started talkin' about you, you were doin' a lot more than flashing. Can't believe they fucked it up like that."

Of course, he hadn't actually said anything about her. He knew better than to mess around with Sadie Curtis's friend, since that meant screwing over his whole outfit. But it sure was fun to mess with her.

Lucy, unaware that Dally was lying, was appalled that someone who claimed to be attracted to girls could hate them so much. She was appalled by everything Dallas Winston did, but now that it was about her body, she hated him more than she ever had. She narrowed her eyes at him and noticed she was trying to suppress a smile. In spite of her burning hatred for him, she had to admit he knew how to play with his words.

"You realize we're fifteen years old, don't you?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah. What are you tryin' to say?"

Lucy rolled her eyes and waved her hand at him in dismissal. All the while, he was laughing at her. She interpreted it as ridicule. After years of being ridiculed (especially by boys), she never knew that a boy could speak to her in any other way.

"Ya know what I like about you, Bennet?" Dally asked.

"I hope the answer's nothing."

He winked at her. She wasn't sure if he knew what else _nothing _could mean, but judging by the look in his eye, she figured he was smart enough to guess. Smart? What gave him the right?

"Yeah, nothin'," he said. "Nothin' and the way you think you can talk to me."

"That's so funny. I _hate _the way you think you can talk to _me_."

"You're real strange, you know that?"

Lucy sucked in her breath. She wanted to look tough, especially because she didn't want to give Dallas Winston the satisfaction of knowing that he'd hurt her feelings.

"Real strange," Dally repeated. "What kinda book-readin' broad thinks she can walk up to me an' accuse me of talkin' shit about her?"

Lucy said nothing. She shook her head as if to inspire some sort of shame or regret in Dally (knowing, of course, that it would never work) and turned on her heels. He was snickering about something as she walked away, though she paid him no mind – at least, not anything that he could hear.

"I didn't say shit about you," Dally finally said. "But if I was gonna, it'd be that I think you're real strange."

She thought about his words later that night as she sat on her bed and pored over the English translation of Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast" tale. Originally, her French teacher had wanted to assign the text in its original French, but after the students complained that they just couldn't read that much French at one time, she gave up and assigned the English version. Lucy, who had wanted to be fluent in French since her father bought her a copy of _Madeline_, was vocally disappointed.

"I'm only saying that I've _read _the English version," she said. "And this is class in French. Are we not here to _learn _something?"

"No," some boy in the back shouted up at Lucy, who always sat in the second row (She didn't want to sit in the front row like some kind of nerd.). "I'm here to get laid and graduate."

"In that order!" another boy piped up.

Lucy rolled her eyes, both in class and on her bed as she remembered it. She took pride in her intelligence, or at least she told herself that she should. In some respects, she was sure it was all she had to offer the world. She wasn't slim like Sadie, nor was she cute like Jane, so she knew she could cross _beauty_ off her list. Two years earlier, she'd been arrested for aggravated assault and ordered, by the court, to carry at least one book with her wherever she went until she turned eighteen, so she couldn't call herself _demure_, either. Smart was the only thing she knew how to be, and it made her bitter. It made her angry. It came out in condescension and in arrogance, and the one good part of her that wanted to control it always failed. It was worse now that she'd been thrown into a new town … _again_. Despite Sadie Curtis's kindness, Lucy still felt exceptionally odd and out of place in her new home. Dallas Winston calling her "real strange" to her face certainly hadn't helped.

She turned to "La belle et la bête," (or "Beauty and the Beast," as it was, after all, the useless English version) and read aloud for her own amusement.

"'My name is not Lord,' replied the monster," she read, "'but Beast. I don't love compliments, not I. I like people to speak as they think; and so do not imagine, I am to be moved by any of your flattering speeches.'"

She stopped and clicked her tongue, thinking that the Beast had quite a bit in common with Dallas Winston. Both were needlessly brutish and both were markedly cruel to a woman who spent much of her time reading books who only wanted to see some decency out of them. But where the Beast had always been something of a man underneath – someone capable of change – Dallas Winston was all beastly. There would be no saving him.

She thought for a moment that she would never be Beauty. She'd never be clever or kind enough for anyone to fall in love with. Even if the Beast had a good laugh at the thought of her body, he would only be interested in the taste of flesh – not in her, never in her. It almost bothered her, but then she remembered that she was supposed to be too odd to care. From that moment on, she'd renounce all the old fairytales. If she were too odd to fit into them, then she would destroy them altogether, beginning with that Beast.

* * *

**Hinton owns _The Outsiders_. The original "Beauty and the Beast" tale is in the public domain. You can find it online. It's ... an experience.**


	2. Chapter 2

Lucy Bennet again felt especially odd on October 26, 1963; the day she turned sixteen years old.

Though Sadie and Jane had insisted on throwing her a birthday party, Lucy pitched enough of a fit so that they dropped the idea altogether. She said it was because birthdays were a bizarre thing to celebrate ("Why commemorate another day that brings you closer to death?" she'd asked, which scared the living hell out of Jane.), but the truth was that she knew if they all got together at Sadie's house, then she would probably have to see Dallas Winston. And if she had to see Dallas Winston, it meant she also had to see his girl, Sylvia something.

Of course, Lucy was nowhere near jealous of Sylvia something, nor was there anything particularly wrong with her. She was a tough broad. One time, Lucy could have sworn she saw her open a bottle of beer using only her teeth. No one believed her, but Lucy maintained it. She knew what she saw. What she hated was the way Dally acted whenever he was with Sylvia something. If she thought he was beastly before she came around, he was certainly a beast now that they were together. It seemed like every time Lucy saw them together, he made a point of ramming his tongue down his girl's throat. What was his goal, anyhow? Did he want to make her sick? Did he want to remind her that the only girls with any sexual prospects were tall and slim, like Sadie and Jane? Every move that Dallas Winston made was, in her view, made to torture her. A small part of her even enjoyed it, though she hadn't given language to that part yet.

After weeks of pestering, Lucy finally agreed to spend the evening of her sixteenth birthday in a booth with Sadie and Jane down at Jay's. As soon as they got comfortable, that annoying "Two Faces Have I" song playing in the background, disaster struck. Dallas Winston walked right through that door with his arm draped around Sylvia something's waist. She was looking toward a guy at the counter; he was looking toward the girls' booth in the back. Lucy's heart dropped into her stomach.

"I don't believe it," she muttered. "Of all the gin joints …"

Sadie chuckled under her breath, and Jane let out a, "Huh?" Jane hadn't seen too many movies then – at least, she hadn't seen too many movies that didn't star Frankie and Annette.

Her eyes followed the couple as Sylvia something went up to the counter to flirt with the boy behind it, and Dally walked right over to the girls' booth in the back of the restaurant. Lucy pretended not to see him. That was what her grandfather back East told her to do if she ever found herself face-to-face with a bear: Play dead. Pretend not to see him. She figured that also applied to no-count hoods who were always out for blood, no matter how he had to get it.

"Whaddya know?" he laughed, his eyes fixed on Lucy, almost as though Sadie and Jane weren't there at all. Out of her periphery, Lucy noticed them trying to stifle their own giggles, which she'd have their heads for later. In that moment, the only thing that mattered was finding a way to castrate Dallas Winston with her wit.

"I know plenty of things," Lucy said. "I'm not so sure you do."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, to begin, I'm quite certain you're supposed to be in my World History class, and you're never there. So, those are things you don't know."

"School don't count for shit. You ain't gotta sit in a tiny desk and pretend to listen to some old lady to learn that some fuckin' guy named 'Raphael' painted somethin' called _The School of Athens_."

Lucy furrowed her brow, mostly to conceal the fact that she was impressed. She thought back to a week earlier, when she'd sat on the Curtises' couch with Ponyboy, showing him an art-history textbook that her father got her for free at the university. Dally had been in the living room, too – for the first time in what felt like forever, he wasn't with Sylvia something. Lucy had stopped on _The School of Athens _to talk about it for quite some time, as it was one of her favorite Italian Renaissance paintings. How could she have ever imagined that Dallas Winston was listening? What use did he have to listen?

"You can be impressed," Dally said, right off her look. "I ain't gonna tell anyone."

"I'd never be impressed with you," Lucy said. "I wouldn't even be impressed with you if you learned to speak fluent Latin."

"Guess I better start readin' Latin, then."

Lucy didn't have a comeback, but she got away with it. Dallas Winston began to laugh to himself (and at her, but less so). He smirked at her and said, "You're still real strange, ain't you?"

She would have protested if she thought it would be of any use. There was just no winning against a beast like Dallas Winston. Even if she was clever and tough as hell, he was strong and scary. Since it would betray every fiber of her existence, Lucy knew she could never vocalize how scary she really found Dallas Winston. He had a look about him that said he didn't care whether he lived or died, and that was enough to terrify even the toughest of girls. For a moment, she thought she might care whether Dallas Winston lived or died, but she shut those thoughts off. They did her no good. All she needed to do was hate him.

Dally grabbed Lucy's glass of Coca-Cola from the table and lifted it above his head, angling it so that it nearly dropped on Lucy.

"You're gonna be wearin' this in about five seconds," he said. "And there ain't nothin' you can do to stop me."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"Why? You think you can take me?"

"I …"

"I'd love to see you try. Really. I think we might even come to a draw or somethin'. I don't know. You're pretty fuckin' tough."

"What makes you say that?"

"Ya look at me like ya wanna rip my guts out. That's cool."

Lucy almost blushed. It wasn't that she was receiving a compliment from Dallas Winston, whose eyes she'd recently admitted, to the secret pages of her diary, were wonderful to look at. It was simply an honor to know she was the kind of girl who could eviscerate him if she wanted to.

"You're saying you want to be ripped apart?" Lucy asked.

"I'm saying I wouldn't mind if it was you doin' the rippin'."

She looked up at him and almost smiled. To her chagrin, he _was _smiling. But Lucy knew better than that. She thought back to her biology textbook and how animals that showed their teeth were always the first ones to get killed. She wouldn't make herself prey like that. After all, she wasn't the Beast (She couldn't be.). She wasn't Beauty, either, but Dallas Winston didn't need to know that.

"You're real strange," he said.

There were those words again. It had been about a year since the last time he spoke them (not like she was keeping track, and not like she thought back to that moment from last November every other day), and even now, they still stung. And why had he felt compelled to say the same thing twice in one night? She swung her whole body around in the booth, narrowed her eyes at him, and prepared to eviscerate – just like he was begging her to do.

"At least I'm not violent," she said.

"If you think you ain't violent, you got another thing comin', honey."

"I'm _not _violent."

"If you ain't violent, why're you geared up for a fight?"

She glanced down at her body, suddenly feeling how stiff and angry she was. Her palms had turned into fists; just like the judge told her they couldn't anymore back when she was thirteen. She prayed that Dallas Winston would never find out about the aggravated assault. If he did, it would only give him more ammunition to call her strange. It would only further remind her that he was the Beast – worse than the Beast.

_Was she a Beast, too?_

She couldn't be – not after the way her mother sobbed in court (as though anyone would touch a thirteen-year-old white girl) and the way her father shook his head, somewhere in between embarrassment and ironic pride. She'd never told anyone about that day in the cafeteria back when she lived in Ohio, and she wasn't planning on it, either. Lucy much preferred her reputation as the smartest of her friends. She didn't want to add _most violent _to the list, too. After all, she was older now. She'd read Thoreau on civil disobedience, and it sounded like it got you a lot further than punching somebody into mindless submission, like Dallas Winston. It was more mature to restrain oneself, she thought. Sixteen was practically an adult, she (at sixteen) believed. She reached for the book she'd brought with her that night (Gaston Leroux's _The Phantom of the Opera_, as she went through a pulp phase during her tenth-grade year) and started reading in order to curb the violent impulsivity that pulsed through her.

"_If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me."_

She had to fight another roll of her eyes. She wondered if that was how Dallas Winston had landed Sylvia something – trying to convince her that he wasn't a bad guy, just a guy that society had done badly by. Lucy hoped not, since that would be the biggest load of bull she ever heard. Jackasses chose to be jackasses; no-count hoods chose to be no-count hoods. From her point of view, Dallas Winston had gladly chosen to be both. There was no man under the monster – no tortured soul to be saved, nothing that a woman could ever truly love. He was Beast. He was phantom. He was no good.

Even after all that time, Dallas Winston still hadn't gone away. He hadn't returned Lucy's drink, either. He still stood there, glass hovering over Lucy's head, snickering at the sight of her with her book.

"You're real strange," he said for the third time that night. "What kinda broad tries to fight me then reads a fuckin' book instead?"

"The kind of broad you really don't want to mess with," Lucy spat, not looking up from her pages. "And don't call me a broad."

"I'll call you whatever I wanna call you."

"Fine, but then it has to be a two-way street. I'll call you whatever _I _want to call _you_."

"What're you gonna call me?"

Lucy didn't love the way that Dallas Winston was looking at her. It was almost the way he looked at Sylvia something, but not quite. There was something behind his eyes that Lucy couldn't quite narrate. He almost looked happy to be there with her, though Lucy knew that wasn't possible. Dallas Winston wasn't the kind of guy who was ever happy, at least not for more than a few seconds, and he certainly wouldn't find those few seconds when he was with her. She was all the bookish parts of Beauty without any of the pretty.

_Why do I even care? _Lucy thought. She kept reading.

After a few seconds, Dally must have recognized that Lucy wasn't going to dignify his question with a response, so he let out one last chuckle and put the glass of Coca-Cola back down in front of her. She looked at the glass and then up at him, quizzically.

"What?" she asked. "I thought I was going to be wearing that, and there wasn't anything I could do to stop you."

"There wasn't," Dally said. "I'm the only one who can stop me, so I did. Changed my mind. People can do that, ya know."

"So, if someone changes his mind and decides maybe, hey, he won't be such a hood anymore …"

"That's askin' a little much. Whadda you think?"

Lucy shook her head, finding that she was still suppressing a smile. As much as she really hated Dallas Winston, she had to admit that she loved the rush that came from sparring with him. He was just so easy to fight.

"What made you change your mind?" she asked.

"Dunno. Got bored. You just sit here and read. 'S boring."

"Reading doesn't have to be boring."

"That's exactly the kinda thing a nerd would say. You a nerd?"

Lucy withdrew. Yes, of course she was a nerd. She wore "Certainly Red" lipstick, had a silver tongue, and could pack a hell of a punch when she wanted, but she was, at her very core, a nerd. That lady who wrote "Beauty and the Beast" must have been out of her mind when she wrote that anybody could fall in love with a girl like Lucy. Not like she cared.

Dally was chuckling again. It was somewhere in between _jackass _and … and something else. Lucy had her suspicions about what it could be, but all of her suspicions felt unnatural.

"Thought so," he said.

Lucy rolled her eyes and turned back to her book. But then …

"Mighta changed my mind 'cause it's your birthday."

Startled, Lucy looked up from her book and tried to ask Dally another question, but he was gone. He was at the counter, probing the back of Sylvia something's throat with his tongue, almost like he knew Lucy was watching. She turned to Sadie and Jane who were slowly letting go of their giggles.

"Not that I don't _hate _him," Lucy said, "but how did he know it was my birthday? I never said anything."

Sadie and Jane were too busy giggling to really answer, and Lucy rolled her eyes. She was so tired of giggling, mostly because she felt like she didn't have anything worth giggling about.

"What?"

"He didn't dump that Coke over your head," Jane said, exchanging another giggle with Sadie.

"Yes, Jane, I can see that."

"He'd do a lot worse to somebody else," Sadie said. "He'd do a lot worse to _anybody _else."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

But Sadie and Jane didn't say anything. They just kept giggling. Meanwhile, Lucy was left feeling nothing but odd – odd that she was sixteen, odd that Dallas Winston hadn't poured that Coke over her head (or worse), and odd that she wanted him to come back and spar with her a little more.

But why did she want that? She might not have been Beauty, but he was surely the Beast. She knew better than to let him near her again. Didn't she?

Judging by the odd feeling coursing through her entire body, she knew she had better stay away.

* * *

**Hinton owns **_**The Outsiders**_**. The song, "Two Faces Have I" is by Lou Christie, who sings in a Valli-esque falsetto. It's exactly the kind of bubblegum pop that I love without embarrassment, but I certainly do not own it. Lucy reads a passage from **_**The Phantom of the Opera**_**, which is (as a novel, anyway) in the public domain.**


	3. Chapter 3

Lucy Bennet was sure she would never feel odder than she did in July 1964, on an otherwise average day when she was exceptionally hot.

She lay flat on her back in Sadie's living room, parallel to her best friend, sweltering as they listened to their records in the middle of the floor. During "It Hurts to Be in Love," Darry came in from outside and frowned.

"Do ya _have _to do that in middle of the living room?" he asked. He'd just gotten back from work and wasn't itching to find two zonked-out teenage girls moving in on his space.

"What're you askin' us not to do?" Sadie asked, not even lifting her head from the ground. "Breathe? Sweat? Live? I'm pretty sure we gotta do all of those things."

"Well, could ya maybe do 'em in your room?"

"You want me to go to the back of the house, where it's even hotter? Sounds like you wanna kill me."

"I've wanted to kill you since the minute you were born."

"But not the day, since that'd mean you'd have to kill Soda, too?"

"Now you're gettin' it."

Sadie and Darry shared a laugh, and he took a seat on the couch, anyway, not particularly bothered to have his sister and her best friend on the ground below him. There were so many people rotating in and out of that house that it didn't really make a difference where Sadie decided to park her ass. Lucy smiled to herself when she thought about Sadie's relationships with her brothers. She loved them all and for all different reasons, and they loved her. No matter where Sadie went, she was never alone. As an only child, Lucy would never know the feeling. When she went home at night, she didn't have anybody to talk to except her parents, and they were … well, they were her parents. She knew from watching Sadie and her brothers that there was something powerful in having a sibling … in not being alone, in not being odd-numbered. In fact, when she thought on it, she was the one only child she knew, except for maybe Dallas Winston (She'd heard him allude to somebody named _V_, but she didn't know who that was.). The more she thought about being an only child, the more her heart sank. It was just another way she was the odd one out. It was just another way she'd never quite fit in.

"What book did ya bring with you today, Lucy?" Sadie asked, still not moving, not even to make eye contact with her best friend.

"Huh?"

"What book did ya bring? You always bring a book wherever you go like the world's gonna explode if ya don't. What on your list for today?"

"Oh. Um, I'm reading _Jekyll and Hyde_."

"But we read that for school already."

"I know. I liked it a lot, so I thought I'd go for it again. I kind of like the idea of a guy thinking he can be two different people, but knowing deep down that's not possible. You're just … I don't know, you're just one person. I liked reading about that, so I wanted to read it again."

Sadie snorted in amusement. Lucy almost asked her what she was going to say, but she didn't need to. She could have predicted it, anyway.

"You really are odd," Sadie said. "Ain't you?"

"What makes you say that?"

"I don't know anybody else who'd reread somethin' they read for school in the middle of July when nobody's lookin'. I think even Pony gets scarred by books he reads for school."

From the couch, Darry let out a short laugh. Lucy would have looked up at him, but she was fading away from heat exhaustion. She was sure of it.

"You're tellin' me," he said. "Kid tells me how much he hated _Heart of Darkness _at least once a day since he read it."

"Well, nobody blames him for that," Lucy said. "It speaks for itself. 'The horror, the horror.'"

"You really are odd," she said. "I don't know anybody else who sits around quotin' classic literature like it's nothing."

"Am I supposed to be embarrassed by that?"

"No. You're just … you're my book girl. That's all."

Lucy swallowed hard. She was afraid of that. As much as she loved being smart, she didn't want anybody to know her as _the book girl_. She wanted to be Lucy – a girl who liked books and liked to work things out with her wit but who could tangle with the best of them if she needed to (or wanted to). She wanted, as she read in _The Bell Jar _when she was fifteen, to be everything. Lucy wanted to be everything and knew it was impossible, so it made her feel like nothing. She touched her hand to her (sweaty) stomach and cursed it for not being flat enough. She felt the same way about her stupid hips and her stupid breasts. Hadn't they heard? Her body went out of fashion years ago. Everyday, she wished she looked more like Sadie or more like Jane – trim and tall and perfect. She saw the way Johnny Cade looked at (or tried not to look at) Sadie when they were outside. Even Soda stole a few glances at Jane here and there, despite his going steady with somebody else. As far as Lucy could see, nobody stole glances at her. She was certain nobody saw her as more than Sadie's odd best friend with all the books.

"I'm telling you, Sadie," Lucy finally said. "I'm _too _hot. I'm so hot that I've been lying here, wondering if there's any way I can cut myself out of my own skin."

"If you're gonna do that, could ya maybe not do it on our carpet?" Darry asked. "Dad would make me clean up the blood for sure."

"You'd just get Pony to do it," Sadie pointed out.

"You're right. I would."

They shared another laugh, and Lucy's heart ached for a second. She wanted a team member –to not be an odd number anymore. The Curtises had spent the past two years making her feel nothing but loved and welcomed in the last place she ever thought she'd feel loved or welcomed, but she always went back to her parents at the end of the night. Though she adored her parents (even her hysterical mother), it wasn't the same. It never would be. Even with her own parents, she would always be the third – always odd.

"I'm not getting any cooler," Lucy said.

"Maybe that's got somethin' to do with all the books you read," Darry joked.

"Shut up, Darry," Sadie said. "Why're you even still here?"

"Dunno. Kinda fun watchin' you two girls act like … two girls."

Perhaps bizarrely, both Lucy and Sadie knew exactly what he meant. If you had to just sit and watch a pair of girl best friends be themselves, they were the ones you'd pick. They loved each other and knew each other almost as well as a pair of sisters … though, of course, they weren't sisters. Sisters had each other's eyes and noses and never left each other's sides. Even when they were apart, they could never really be apart. Lucy closed her eyes to avoid the stinging of tears behind them. She wasn't sure why she felt like she could cry in the middle of the Curtis living room, especially over something she thought about and considered time and again. She decided to blame it on the heat. The heat could make people hysterical like that, she figured. Finally, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, wishing for something. She wasn't sure what it was, exactly, but she knew it was something.

"I'd get up and get myself a glass of water, but that'd mean _moving_," Lucy complained. "And it's too hot to move. Please tell me you know it's too hot to move."

"It _is _hot," Darry said. "But if you ain't movin', that's your problem, not the sun's."

"You're closer to standing up. Why don't you get me a glass of water?"

"Naw."

"Why not? Aren't I a guest in your house?"

"It's my _folks' _house, and either way, answer's no. Ya stay here often enough that it's kinda like your house, too. Don't ya think?"

_Except I'm the odd one out_, she thought. _I always have to leave at the end of the night. I always end up by myself_.

"Fine," Lucy said, more playful than anything else. "I guess I'll just lie here, dying of thirst. That sounds like a good plan, don't you think?"

"Don't die," Sadie said. "If you die, that means _I'm _gonna have to put on a black dress in the middle of summer and give you a eulogy in a stuffy church. And then they're gonna have to throw a funeral for me."

"I don't think you 'throw' a funeral. I think you 'throw' weddings, but I don't think you 'throw' funerals."

"Well, here's hopin' I don't have to figure that out for a long time."

A few seconds later, Mrs. Curtis came through the living room from the backyard, chuckling a little to herself when she saw Sadie and Lucy lying on the floor, desperate and lazy.

"Is this what's in fashion these days, girls?" she asked.

"Mom, have you never met me?" Sadie asked. "I've never done anything that's in fashion."

"There's my Sadie Lou." She looked down at Lucy and smirked. "And there's my Lucy."

"Hi, Mrs. Curtis," Lucy said.

"Somethin' tells me this was all your idea."

"Might have been. Hey, can you get me a glass of water before I drop dead?"

After spending a lot of days and nights at the Curtis house, especially in the summer, Lucy felt comfortable asking Sadie's mom for help. But Mrs. Curtis laughed out loud.

"Get your own, Lucy," she said, though it was good-natured. "Family gets their own water."

Lucy sighed again.

"Harsh," she laughed. "But I get it."

"Thank you, honey."

She was about to get up, but Sadie asked her another question.

"What's that thing about _Jekyll and Hyde _that ya pointed out in class this year?" she asked. "You know, that thing you did with the names."

Thankful that Sadie couldn't see it, Lucy smirked. It was one of the smarter things she'd said in class that year, and it pissed everyone, including the honors teacher, right off. Lucy had felt a little guilty about the whispers and the eye rolls, but it was all she had. She wasn't Beauty, and with the temper she was constantly trying to suppress, she was afraid she might turn into the Beast. School was the only way she could hide her face and her rage. School was the only thing she felt like she was good at – the only thing that made her worthwhile.

"_Hyde _is obvious," she said, her voice smooth and professorial, like she picked up from listening to her father's lectures. "He's hiding the murderous facets of his personality. But the proof is in the pudding – in this case, the name Henry Jekyll was born with. J-E-K-Y-L-L. The French for _I _is _Je_, and _kill … _'I kill.'"

Sadie let out a long, slow laugh.

"You're gonna be a professor someday, ain't you?" Sadie asked.

"I hope so," Lucy said. "Of course, I'm pretty sure I'm about thirty minutes away from dropping dead, so …"

Before she could finish her thought, either sincerely or sarcastically, she felt something nudge her in the crook of her neck. It wasn't a kick, but it was enough to get her to notice. She jumped up, offended … and even more offended when she saw Dallas Winston standing over her.

"What do you think you're doing?" she snapped. "You work with horses, and you think you can just touch me with your boot?"

"I think I can touch you with a lot of things, honey," he said. "You just say the word."

Lucy folded her arms across her chest in defiance. It would have been cute if she weren't such a pain in the ass. Then again, she was cute because she was a pain in the ass, so Dally wasn't really sure what to think.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" Lucy asked.

"Shuttin' you up."

Dally nodded toward something in his right hand. Lucy's eyes followed his gaze and noticed that he had a glass of water – for her. She wrinkled her nose and stared at it.

"How long have you been here?" Lucy asked.

"Long enough to want you to shut up," Dally said. "You gonna drink it or just stare at it?"

"How do I know you didn't poison it?"

"'Cause that'd be a weak way of killin' somebody."

Lucy had to conceal a smile. She agreed, but she wasn't going to tell him that. She didn't want him to think they were ever on the same wavelength.

"'Pound at thy powder,'" she remembered a poem from her anthology. "'I am not in haste.'"

"What are you talkin' about?"

"What's it to you?"

They were quiet for a little while. Lucy thought she could hear Sadie snickering softly under her breath. Dally lowered his eyes to the floor for a moment, almost embarrassed (Beasts were never embarrassed.), before he looked up at her with feigned annoyance in his eyes.

"Well, take it, already," he snapped. "You're no good to me dead."

"You're no good to me living."

"Now, now, now. That's a little harsh, don't ya think?"

"Are you familiar with the concept of irony?"

"I'm familiar with lots of things."

He eyed Lucy's body up and down with that familiar glint in his eye.

"Well, maybe not as many things as I'd like."

Lucy rolled her eyes and tried to hide her body. Dallas Winston was the only boy in the world who ever looked at her like he wanted to touch her (like he wanted her to touch him right back), so she figured it must have been some kind of sick joke. She didn't look a thing like Sylvia something, and if she was his type, then there was no way he'd really try to go after somebody who looked like Lucy. She was too short and, by comparison to the other girls in town, too fat. And though Lucy knew she wasn't (not exactly), it was hard not to see it that way when she stood in the middle of Jane and Sadie, slim girls who stood four and five inches higher than she did, respectively. It was hard to feel like she fit in (or that anyone could find her attractive) when she was the only one of her kind. She felt more like a clown than a girl, and she knew that must have been how Dallas Winston saw her, too.

But what did she care if the Beast thought she was Beauty?

He handed her the glass without another word, and in that one, swift motion, when she brushed his hand with hers, she felt odder than ever. Her skin turned hot and cold at the same time, tingling around her fingers, in her chest … _everywhere_. Lucy could feel herself turning bright red, and she wished that she wasn't so pale. Was this touch lingering long than it should have? Her heart was beating faster than she thought it should, and she wanted it to shut up. Why wasn't it shutting up? Why did she continue to feel so _odd_?

She pulled her hand away and shook it out, as though to forget the memory of the way his hand felt against hers. It was better to forget it. It wasn't like it would ever happen again … nor was it like she wanted it to. Dallas Winston was a no-count hood, and the only thing he could do was bring out the Beast in Lucy Bennet – the Beast she'd been working for years to silence and suppress.

Finally, Dally grumbled an awkward, "You're welcome," and that was the end of it. Well, it was the end of it for him. Lucy carefully sat back down on the floor, one leg crossed over the other, glass pressed to her lips without sipping. She was hot (sweltering, really), but she had a feeling that the water couldn't fix it anymore. This was different. Even though she heard Sadie and Darry bickering about what to watch on the television, they sounded so far away to Lucy … like they were in a tunnel or something. She couldn't stop thinking about how odd it was that Dallas Winston had bothered to get her the glass of water she'd been begging for. She couldn't stop thinking about how odd it was that she felt anything when they touched hands … how odd it was that she felt _so much_. When he brushed her hand, she almost felt like Beauty. It didn't help that he looked at her like a Beast … like if he ever wanted her it would only be a joke … something he could hold over her head and laugh about with the other boys (except for Soda, who wouldn't stand to talk about Lucy that way). She hated him. She hated him for nudging her in the neck with his boot, and she hated him for getting her a glass of water out of nowhere, as if he was a decent guy or something. He wasn't. He was Jekyll, and she was …

"Stop lookin' at me," Dally said. "You're real strange. You know that?"

Lucy didn't respond. She sat down on the floor, and he went back outside for a smoke without so much as a snide remark on his way out.

As she sat on the floor, one leg crossed over the other, she moved awkwardly against the carpet. She was hotter now, and no matter how cold that glass was, it couldn't help. She'd never felt it before, and though it was pleasing, she wasn't sure she wanted to feel it again … not about _him_. Not about the Beast.

So, then, why wasn't it going away?

* * *

**Hinton owns **_**The Outsiders**_**. Lucy quotes Robert Browning's poem, "The Laboratory," which is in the public domain (and is great).**


	4. Chapter 4

**So, in this vignette, there is a (still rather implicit) sex scene between two consenting adults. Just letting you know it's there. It's all very **_**coded **_**and **_**shaded**_**, but it's there.**

* * *

Lucy Bennet felt her oddest on October 26, 1965. It was the night of her eighteenth birthday, and after a month of intense and near-constant bantering with Dallas Winston (which, in retrospect, had been going on since the second they met three years earlier) she had finally come to grips with the fact that she was attracted to him. She was standing in the middle of his room, moments after punching Buck Merril in the gut to run past him at the front door, and she knew exactly what she was doing there. So did he. It was time to give the Beast his second back.

What was she doing? She'd punched guys before, and she was clever as the devil. But this … this was entirely out of her league, and _she _was the one who initiated it. She was the one who told him to lock the door, but what was she thinking? It had only been a matter of days since she'd realized she didn't hate the absolute piss out of him, and it had been _hours _since she realized he was into her, too. This was more than just odd. She was an idiot.

In that moment, Lucy was sure there was no one in the world dumber than she was. She was eighteen years old – a virgin who'd never even been kissed – and she thought she could have all of her firsts with _him_? Dally might have liked Lucy, but she was quite sure she would survive even one night with him. But she didn't show it. She planted her feet firmly on the ground and waited for him to direct her, which was something she thought she'd never think.

He walked toward the radio and turned it on, not quite drowning out the sound of country music downstairs, but providing a sufficient distraction nevertheless. Then, careful not to brush up against her, he locked the door, exactly as she'd instructed him to moments earlier. Lucy watched him as he moved, realizing for the first time that he was almost graceful. She wouldn't tell him that, of course, but it was something of a truth. She bit her lip to avoid another smile. Smiling too much, as they both agreed, was for the weak, and they were strong.

That song about "The Birds and the Bees" was finishing up on the radio, and Lucy had to snort at the coincidence. Unfortunately, the snort was loud enough that Dally heard it, and when he did, he smirked at her like he had something to say.

"What?" Lucy asked, off his look.

"Nothin'," Dally said. "You're just … you're real strange, Bennet."

"You've said that for years."

"It's been true for that long."

"But what do you mean?"

"Look, you come in here, you gimme those 'Take me' eyes, and then you wanna stand here an' _talk _about you bein' strange? It's gotta be one or the other, Bennet, and from where I'm standin', it better be the first one."

Lucy didn't say anything. She was too busy slowly and quietly exhaling, trying to erase that odd feeling in her body. Who did she think she was? She wasn't the kind of girl who had sex with Dallas Winston. She wasn't the kind of girl who had sex _at all_. That was her claim to fame – make everybody think she was more interested in books and her education than in boys, so they wouldn't know she thought she was too odd (oddly persuaded and oddly shaped) for love. But this was not love. This was a momentary thing that she was dumb enough to ask for (and would regret in the morning, likely). Dally saw the look on her face, sighed loudly, and relented. She might have been odd, but she was pretty enough to always get her way. That was part of why he must have …

"You wanna know what makes you real strange?" Dally asked.

"I've wanted to know for _years_," Lucy said.

"It's 'cause you're too many things all at the same time. You're smarter than anybody I ever met, and you walk around knowin' it. Thought smart people were supposed to be quiet. You've read every book in the world, but you ain't a quiet reader. You're loud with your books. You get pissed when ya hear about rumbles, but you're always the first one to make a fist. You don't make any fuckin' sense."

Dally bristled. Lucy knew why. She'd never heard him say that much at one time, and it sounded … well, it sounded odd. But it was a good kind of odd … the kind of odd that made her want to coil herself around him and then climb him like a tree. After all, who knew how great his wit could measure?

"Can't I be everything at the same time?" Lucy asked.

Dally nodded.

"Y'already are.

"Is that a problem?"

This time, he shook his head.

"Naw. It's cool."

From Dallas Winston, this was a love letter. Lucy bit her tongue to keep from grinning, though she wanted to. She'd never felt so much like Beauty in all her life.

"Then come here, would you?" she asked. She knew she was assertive (especially for a girl), but Dallas Winston's bedroom was the last place she ever expected to use her assertiveness. She blushed and prayed that the floorboards would give out underneath her.

Dally stepped closer to Lucy again, wrapping his arms around her waist. This time, it was her turn to bristle. No one had ever touched her around her waist before, and it occurred to her that he'd probably realize that she was too fat. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. When he noticed, he cocked his brow at her.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Me?"

"Naw, the other broad I'm tryin' to make out with. Of course you."

Lucy shook her head, trying to forget her nerves and her self-loathing as he loosened his grip around her a little bit.

"Look, I ain't stupid," Dally said. "I know you ain't done this before. And I know you ain't used to bein' the one who knows less than the other person in the room."

Again, Lucy said nothing. She was still shocked that he seemed to understand her as well as he did (and even more shocked that he could put any words to it).

"Just let me take the lead on this one, Bennet," he said. "I won't do anything ya don't like."

"How can I be sure of that?"

"Well, I'm pretty fuckin' good at this, and you don't get to be pretty fuckin' good without payin' attention to the pretty girls you're …"

"I get it."

Her voice told him to shut up, but her eyes said something different. Her eyes, he noticed, were asking him if he really thought she was pretty. It almost made him laugh, but he knew she didn't want to hear that. He couldn't imagine that there was a world where Lucy Bennet didn't know that she was pretty, but apparently, that was the one he was living in. He pulled her closer around her waist, kissed her (her first kiss, as he'd learn some time later), and smirked at her when their lips broke apart.

"You're real pretty," he was growling now. "Prettiest girl I ever brought up here."

"And the oddest," Lucy added.

"Prob'ly."

"What kind of girl spends her whole life reading books and talking shit about boys, then, when she finally decides she wants to screw around, she picks the boy who's least likely to call afterward, least likely to remember her name, and least likely to ever want her more than once?"

"You forgot that I'm most likely to go to jail."

"I figured it was implied."

Dally pushed Lucy's hair behind her ear (Without knowing it, Lucy had put her hair in front of her face like a curtain so Dally didn't have to look directly at her.) and kissed her again. She found that although it wasn't as difficult to kiss as she'd imagined (worried, really, was the more accurate term), she still couldn't shake the odd feeling pulsing throughout her body. Clenching and unclenching her thighs didn't help, either … not anymore. The blood was thrumming everywhere, and though she knew it was nothing short of odd, she kissed him back twice as hard as he'd kissed her. When they broke apart again, noses still pressed together, he laughed. It was neither sweet nor sinister. Lucy knew the word, but she was too flustered to think it.

"You know, you might be more 'n just strange," he said. "You might be crazy."

Lucy laughed, too – neither sinister nor sweet. She knew she was crazy and strange, strange and crazy. Anyone sane person would have run out of that room. No sane person would have abandoned her own birthday party to enter that room in the first place. But Lucy never made sense. She was a bundle of contradictions (smart yet foolish, kind yet arrogant, responsible yet impulsive), and she'd spent so much of her young life trying to make sure she was all one way – all one kind of person. But that wasn't any fun. It was fun, she thought, to be everything. It was fun to be odd, even if _odd _often evolved into _reckless_, like she was that night. If it meant finally satisfying the oddness in the pit of her stomach, then she didn't care if it was reckless. She just needed to know what it would be like, even if she never did it again.

She became suddenly cognizant of the radio as she nodded at him to take off her shirt. Someone on a higher plane must have been looking down on her and Dally and having a laugh, as _Lucy Bennet _and _conquest _didn't seem to pair well. Why else would they have had such a soundtrack?

"_I don't even know how to love you / just the way you want me to / But I'm ready / to learn / Yes, I'm ready / to learn_ …"

Lucy almost wanted to snort, but she didn't want to drive Dally away. His lips on her neck gave her a new odd feeling – one that she liked quite a lot and wanted to keep chasing down. She pulled his face closer to her on pure instinct and pure impulse, impatient for more. When he laughed at her (not cruelly, but … there was that word she was too flustered to think of again), she almost felt beautiful. She almost felt like she was Beauty, after all.

If she'd had a clearer head, she probably would have asked him to keep her shirt on. In the moment, it didn't seem to matter much, and he didn't seem to think that she was too pudgy or pasty. Maybe it was all in her head. Even if it wasn't, maybe the body was always secondary to the wit. Lucy didn't know if she really believed that, even as this boy she monstrously wanted kept _kissing _her like he'd been wanting to for a while. She didn't believe it, and yet, it was happening. She was feeling it. It was so … odd.

She lay on her back, playing a game of peek-a-boo with the ceiling, and finally understood what all the songs meant when they said _love me_. If this was what love felt like, she didn't blame Jane for wanting so badly to find it. This was a brand-new odd feeling that couldn't compete with what she'd felt the first time they brushed hands or the first time they kissed. It settled like a soft flame, yet it spread and grew with each passing motion. Suddenly, this wasn't odd at all. Lucy had always thought of Dallas Winston as the Beast, but that had always been about his temperament – his violence and his boorish speech. In that moment, she knew she was right. He _was _the Beast, but this was surely the untold epilogue, in which Beauty discovers she's got a bit more of a Beast in her than she bargained for.

As Lucy caught her breath, Dally looked at her with that same gleam in his eye, and for a moment, the oddness subsided. For a moment, the oddness subsided, and she felt beautiful. But when she, motivated by some kind of insanity or a death wish (Nobody handled Dallas Winston like that.), grabbed a hold of his face and asked him to _love_ her one more time, she knew what was odd about her. She knew why Dally could stand to be around her for more than ten seconds at a time, and she knew why she'd always been so (if not secretly) drawn to him.

Later, she wondered if one day, he'd be around for her to tell him about it.

* * *

**Hinton owns **_**The Outsiders**_**. The soundtrack to Lucy's birthday here is "Yes, I'm Ready" by Barbara Mason, which I don't own. Again, I am as subtle as a train wreck.**


	5. Chapter 5

Eventually, Lucy Bennet thought that the oddest she would ever feel was on November 11, 1975. That was the day she and Dallas Winston celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in New York City, where she was raising their eight-year-old daughter and working on her doctorate.

Every year they remained married was another year that felt unreal … odd. Lucy was shocked that back in '65, Dally had accepted her dare to get married; she was even more shocked when he didn't go through with his escape plan when Elenore was born in '67. The oddest and most shocking thing of all was that he'd managed to be a decent father to Elenore.

Dally was not a warm father, nor had Elenore melted his heart or ended the curse of the Beast. In all, he was still Dallas Winston. But he was a stoically supportive father – nodded when Elenore told him stories about her day at school, asked a few short questions where he should have, and offered, casually, to snap the neck of anyone who dared looked at her funny. It was their normal now, but when Lucy thought of the no-count Beast of a hood she despised in high school, it was still a puzzle.

They told Elenore that it was their tenth anniversary when they picked her up from school. For Elenore, it was always _the best day _when both of her parents picked her up from school. Usually, it was just her dad, and that was OK. She liked that he listened to her. Her mother, of course, always spoke back. There was something nice about the echo.

"What's the point of an anniversary?" Elenore asked. "You're just remembering something that already happened."

"Well, then, I guess I'm not buying you any more birthday presents," Lucy said. "Since, you know, you were already born once."

"Touché, Mom."

"Who the hell taught you how to say _touché_?" Dally asked. He'd bargained down from _fuck _to _hell _since Elenore learned how to speak … at least in front of her. It was the oddest thing that he cared enough to watch himself like that, but then again, the last ten years had been the oddest thing. Lucy Bennet hadn't tamed her Beast. She had, however, gotten to know him, and that made all the difference.

"Mom did," Elenore said.

"Course she did. Your mother and her _French_. People used to think that made her real obnoxious, ya know."

"You love my French," Lucy said, threading her fingers through her husband's. "Have for ten years, as a matter of fact."

"I never told you that."

"I think that's because your tongue's usually a little busy with the French."

"I don't know what that means," Elenore said from her mother's side, "but it sounds gross. Does that mean it _is _gross?"

"Nope, not gross," Lucy said. "Remind me to tell you about kissing."

"I'm not even nine yet."

"But one day, you'll be older than that. And if no one talked to you about kissing when you were young, then you'll just go off and kiss somebody you shouldn't."

Lucy had resolved to be as open and honest with her daughter as possible. This meant allowing her to read more grown-up books than any other third-grade student in her class; on the condition she sat down and had long talks with her mother (who, at that moment, was dissertating on Victorian women's literature – buried in books, just like Beauty was supposed to be) about the content. It was entirely a reaction against her own mother's parenting, which was to worry a lot and attempt to shelter Lucy from anything that was potentially controversial. Lucy's father, of course, snuck her banned books when his wife wasn't looking, and without his assistance, there likely wouldn't have even been a Dallas Winston. There most certainly, then, would never have been an Elenore, and there were no thoughts worse to Lucy's imagination than those.

"Dunno, Bennet," Dally said. "You kissed somebody you shouldn't've. Think it worked out OK for you, didn't it?"

"You wish."

Dally rolled his eyes. Some time later, when they arrived back at their apartment, Lucy told Elenore to go into her room and shut the door for a few minutes. She should try to finish up _Blubber_ so the two of them could talk about it over dinner the following night; besides, Mom wanted to have a word with Daddy alone. Much like her father, Elenore rolled her eyes. She might not have even been nine, but she knew what that meant.

As soon as Lucy heard Elenore's door close, she wrapped her body (about which she wasn't embarrassed anymore – not most of the time, anyway) around her husband and kissed him even harder than she had that first night up in his room when they were eighteen. When she moved her lips from his, he smirked – just like he did when they were eighteen.

"We've been married _ten fucking years_," Lucy said. She was demonstratively impressed.

"Can't fuckin' believe I ain't dead," Dally said.

"Ah, shut up, will you? I mean … my mother thought we'd only make it ten days before we realized we were idiots. I thought we might make it ten months out of stubbornness, but I never would have thought you'd stick around ten years."

"Well, turns out, I don't hate bein' comfortable."

"That's what I am to you? Comfortable?"

"No. You ain't comfortable at all."

Lucy laughed and kissed Dally again. Even after ten years (_especially _after ten years), it was still odd that he let her take charge that way. He'd never tell her, but he secretly liked the way she jumped on him. It reminded him that somebody gave a damn.

"You remember when we was kids?" he asked.

"I remember when you said things that were specific."

"Naw, you remember. You remember when you told me that I didn't make any sense?"

Lucy nodded. She thought back to that night at the Dingo shortly before her eighteenth birthday when she was beginning to realize that she didn't hate Dallas Winston after all. He'd given her his jacket because she looked cold, and she didn't think that lined up with what she knew of him from all the years she'd lived in the old neighborhood. She remembered it well because it was still true.

"Well, you don't make any sense, either," he said. "You're real strange."

And perhaps another wife would have taken offense. Lucy Bennet was not another wife. She smiled a little and played along, just like she knew how.

"Is that why you think we've made it ten years?" she asked.

"Don't make me answer that."

Lucy's smile grew. She knew he would never answer that, but in his refusal to answer, she knew. He liked her (loved her, even, though he'd still never fulfilled the dare she gave him on their second anniversary to one day tell her that he did) because he thought she was Beauty and the Beast. For every book she read and every poem she wrote, she was busting a bottle to fend off a nasty-looking guy or picking up a crowbar, wondering whether or not she should smash the hell out of some jackass's car. While she'd spent so much of her young adulthood trying to figure out if she was one or the other, Beauty or the Beast, she'd forgotten that she could be both. She _was _both. Lucy and Dally were two odd Beasts whom no one else really understood. That had to be why it had been ten years, and neither of them had left the other in the lurch. It had to be why, Lucy figured, they could make it another ten ... if they didn't push their luck.

"Well, then, happy anniversary," Lucy said. Her voice was so quiet and hushed it was almost like she hoped Dally wouldn't hear. He still didn't like to use the word _happy _very often, even if (when) he was. He knew how to be, sometimes, now.

"Yeah," he said, his voice somehow lower and quieter. "You, too."

What an odd little decade.

* * *

**Hinton owns **_**The Outsiders**_**. In case you've never read it, **_**Blubber **_**is a children's novel by Judy Blume from 1974. It is also great (and very important).**


	6. Chapter 6

Lucy Bennet thought it was odd when Disney made a jolly little musical out of _Beauty and the Beast _in the 90s. She'd always read the original fairytale as something of a horror story – one that women gave to their daughters to teach them how to be the best and most submissive wives. How could anyone make a happy musical out of a story that terrifying? When the film was released, Lucy was grateful that Elenore was twenty-four years old and even more uninterested in princesses than she'd ever been – except for Princess Leia, who was still Elenore's hero. Either way, Lucy was glad that she wouldn't have to sit through some ridiculous rendition of _Beauty and the Beast _for as long as she lived … and then Elenore gave birth to a daughter, Veronica, in 1995.

Since Elenore was a single parent (and no one knew who Veronica's father was), Lucy and Dally were often responsible for Veronica while their own daughter went to work. One day, when Elenore was about four years old in 1999, she came to Grandma and Grandpa's apartment with a brand-new VHS tape in tow – the VHS for _Beauty and the Beast_.

When Lucy opened Veronica's backpack for the day and pulled out the tape, she frowned at Elenore before she could leave the house.

"What's this?" Lucy asked.

"It's a movie," Elenore said. "You watch them. Typically, you enjoy this activity."

"Sittin' and watchin' somethin' ain't no activity," Dally pointed out. He was already on the couch with Veronica, who sat beside him and showed him a picture book about all the instruments in a symphony orchestra. As she flipped each page, he nodded in acknowledgement. He didn't need to say anything for her to know that he was paying attention.

"Oh, so, you're arguing semantics now, Dad? With a lawyer? You're sure this is what you want to do?"

"Pretty sure, thanks."

Elenore concealed a smile and turned back to her mother, who was still waving the VHS copy of _Beauty and the Beast _in her daughter's face.

"I can't believe you would let her watch something like this," Lucy said. "You know how I feel about that story. It's terrifying! When the Beast turns into a prince again, he says it's because he's finally felt the love of a virgin! I don't want my granddaughter watching stuff like that! What happened to the way I raised you? Huh?"

Before Elenore could respond, Dally cut in.

"Your ma's got some … _philosophical _bone to pick," he said. "But I don't wanna watch another damn musical with this kid. They gimme the creeps. Look, I love you, Elenore, but I was pretty sure I was done with cartoons after you."

Lucy and Elenore exchanged baffled looks between each other. Off their expressions, Dally frowned and asked them what the hell they were looking at each other like that for.

"Nothing," Lucy said. "I'm just wondering … is that the first time you've ever said 'I love you' to your daughter?"

Dally shook his head once.

"Naw," he said. "I sign it in her birthday cards."

"No, _I _sign it in her birthday cards. You write 'Dad' underneath it."

"It's the same thing."

"It's really not."

Dally clicked his tongue and turned back to Veronica, who was still pointing at the pictures in her book. He kept nodding as she pointed to the illustrations, wondering if he'd ever buck up enough courage to tell his granddaughter he loved her, too (because he did). Lucy, meanwhile, felt her heart turn young again and sink into the pit of her stomach. They had been together more than thirty years, and he still hadn't told her that he loved her; despite the dare she gave him on their second anniversary. She folded her arms against her chest and reminded herself that to be jealous of her daughter would be to betray her undying hatred for the Oedipal triangle. It barely helped.

"This isn't just some stupid kids' movie," Elenore said. "It was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars."

"Oscars are dumb," Lucy said. "Anything can win Best Picture if they sink enough money into it, even if it's just a super expensive version of a high-school kid's report on why racism is bad. I've been saying it every year since that Barbra Streisand _Prince of Tides _movie came out and got all those fancy nominations only to win nothing. Ask your father."

"I'm not really listening to you."

"See?"

"He said he wasn't listening."

"Oh, he just talks."

Elenore rolled her eyes and frowned at Lucy, who had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. She knew that Elenore was over thirty years old, a mother, and couldn't be called cute, but it was cute to see that when Elenore got angry, she still looked just like Dally.

"Look, I told Veronica this was a good movie to watch for a reason," she said.

"What reason?" Lucy asked. "Is it the same reason that priests pray for the _guardians of our virginity?_ I think you know that's a pretty terrible reason, Elenore."

"No. I told her she could watch this one because it reminds me of you and Dad."

Lucy's heart stopped. When Elenore was a little girl, they hadn't done much talking about the Beauty and the Beast story – only that whenever Lucy was made to read it as a child or in school, she would want to rip all of her hair out because of how insufferable the Beast was. How could she have known that Lucy grew up comparing herself to Beauty? How could she have known that Dally was born as little more than a beast with no capacity for loyalty or love?

"What parts?" Lucy asked.

"Just watch the movie, Mom," Elenore said. "Please. I know you. You'll _like _this one."

"I'll hate it," Dally said, not looking up from Veronica's book.

"I know you, too, Dad. You'll hate it."

Lucy eyed Elenore curiously, recognizing (albeit briefly) that her daughter was her own kind of odd. She wondered exactly how much she didn't know about Elenore … how much she probably _should _know about her.

"No guardians of our virginity in this one?" Lucy asked.

"Absolutely no guardians of our virginity."

Lucy frowned and opened the VHS to put it in for Veronica. Elenore waved goodbye to her own daughter before she left for the DA's office (the last place in the world she wanted to be).

When Lucy put in the VHS, she expected to loathe and despise the princess movie, just like she loathed and despised _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_. But she didn't hate it. She didn't hate it at all.

Beauty – now called _Belle_, almost like a whole person – was the oddest girl in a town where she didn't belong. She knew how to take care of herself, and she read books to learn from them, not to cultivate a desirable temperament. Belle wanted adventures. Belle wanted knowledge, and she looked great in blue. Lucy, who was wearing a blue sweater, felt represented in a way that she'd never admit in front of Elenore.

When Belle and the Beast took turns being tough with each other after the Beast got torn up by some wolves, Lucy and Dally exchanged looks, almost like they'd had the same conversation. Lucy wouldn't have said anything, but when Dally asked, "'S that you, Bennet?" she had to say yes. It was too familiar.

When the Beast gave Belle a library of her own (almost like a bookstore to live in), Lucy wondered how expensive it would be to sue Disney for spying on her when she was eighteen. Dally must have heard her thinking it, since he muttered, "Not a good idea on a professor's salary."

"You made thirty grand bringing that computer guy's son back from Toronto not three months ago."

"And you made me put a lot of it in the Veronica college fund."

"Maybe you can take some out."

"You're dreamin', Bennet."

"Mommy says you guys are Beauty and the Beast," Veronica cut in. It was perfect timing. Their voices were beginning to mesh with the ones on the television.

"Which one's which?" Lucy asked.

"She says you're both … both."

In a way, Elenore was right. When they were young, Lucy and Dally were both on the outside of the outside. They were both too clever for their own good, and they were both angrier than they knew what to do with. Lucy sublimated her rage into books; Dally didn't know how to sublimate and just beat the tar out of the guys who pissed him off (and some of the guys who didn't). Both of them were, in their own ways, odd. Those traits were absolutely what brought them together.

Lucy did take issue with one part of that big "Beauty and the Beast" song. The issue was big enough so that she didn't feel like she had to sue Disney – at least, not for as great a sum as she'd intended. The teapot sang:

_"Bittersweet and strange / finding you can change / learning you were wrong."_

But that was just it. Neither of them had changed (at least, not for the worse). They were still those tough, angry kids from Tulsa. They were still the brunette with all the books and the meanest guy in the neighborhood. The difference now (and for thirty-four years) was that they had each other. The difference was that they could look at each other one time and _know_. Their hearts were still hardened, and their fists were still primed for a fight. Now, they went into that fight together. They'd been right about each other since they were young, and nothing about that had changed. But they were better together.

"Hope you ain't expecting a ballroom," Dally said.

"Hope you aren't expecting me to wear yellow."

"Guess I'll have to cross it off my list."

"Hmm, what a shame."

They laughed quietly to themselves. Veronica wasn't paying a lick of attention to them or to the movie. She'd picked up one of her grandfather's files and pretended to read it, like she was going to help him catch a bail jumper.

Before Dally grabbed the papers out of Veronica's hand, he looked at Lucy and said the same thing he always did.

"You're real strange."

After thirty-four years, she finally knew what he was trying to say.

"I know."

Lucy Bennet was odd. But at least now, the oddness was even.

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**And that's it!**

**Can you imagine if I made this a one shot? As it turns out, I have **_**a lot **_**to say about Lucy and Dally, since they are the anchors of the 'A&A' universe. I had a lot more to set up in this piece than I thought, especially in regard to the Veronica storyline. There are a lot of Easter eggs planted in that last section about that, including an indicator of my (potentially controversial) decision about what Dally ends up doing with his life. I kept him alive in my canon; part of that is developing him/making him grow based on what I'm given in the source text. Yikes.**

**Hinton owns **_**The Outsiders**_**. Disney owns their version of **_**Beauty and the Beast **_**(and have successfully extended its copyright by nearly thirty years). I own a keychain shaped like the Skywalker family lightsaber, which should have disintegrated on Bespin in **_**The Empire Strikes Back **_**… and I'm digressing.**


End file.
